As I’ve become more engaged in my usage of twitter I’ve found myself in a situation where it can suck up more and more of my time – the same applies for other forms of social media, by the way, such as Facebook or MySpace for example…

Looking at all the various web-based activities and projects, what we can tell is that not everyone is going to have the time to be as heavily involved in social media as we are.

And I think this is true – but it’s also worth pointing out that even in the amount of time that I devote to social media in the course of a day – it’s almost impossible for me to keep up with all of the traffic on twitter and other services – though I do find them to be valuable tools that I’m glad exist.

My workflow is often disrupted due to Twitter. It took me three hours to write a post yesterday because I was constantly trying to split my attention between Firefox and Twitter. To be honest, this is not going to work for anyone, especially if you’re Twitter stream is a heavy one.

The best solution is to simply exit Twitter: exit your client, close your Twitter tab, and move on.

Corvida goes on to provide some solid & practical ideas on how to manage the level of distraction that Twitter can interrupt your work day with.

For me, I use twhirl on a mac, so I do indeed sometimes have to exit out of the application in order to concentrate on what I’m trying to accomplish.

I’m doing a version of #3. When I really need to focus, I shut Twitter down, but sometimes I keep it up and running without really paying attention to it. That is probably affecting my productivity though, but then again I might get a lead on a story, which is good for staying ahead, so it’s not black and white for me.

I used to be a Twitter addict. Now I just load up my Twitter (me + friends) feed on a feed reader widget, and I only check out messages a few times a day. Yes, Twitter can be a good source for info/news leads, but then the problem is being able to filter the useful information efficiently.

I’ve had some amazing interactions with twitter users – just last night a comment about Microsoft Sharepoint Designer – and this morning I had a @reply from the leader of that team at Microsoft asking for candid feedback about his product.

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